The NYT today published the letter of resignation of Jake DeSantis, Executive Vice President of the A.I.G. Financial Products division. He’s been working 10-14 hours a day for $1, but won’t work for a boss (Edward M. Liddy) who will roll over for political hacks like of Bernie Sanders. He will give his bonus to charity, rather than see it go back into the amorphous pile.

It’s a great letter, and he’s lucky that there’s no Wesley Mouch (yet) to enslave him.

A fascinating movement that has been swelling for weeks via the blogosphere is the “Not One Damn Dime” campaign. Here is one of a thousand postings of this. The idea is to withhold all spending on January 20, Inauguration Day, in protest against the Iraq War. The question is whether this is an effective campaign or whether people who oppose the war should join. As an economist and opponent of the war, I take what might be seen as a counterintuitive position: I’m all for this and I’m going to join!
I was asked whether it might not be wrong to punish the local deli owner that day by not spending money there, as if he has something to do with the war. But not spending any money on January 20 is a purely voluntary act and targetted at no one in particular. The Asian deli owner is not being punished by me, he is just one alternative among several for how I do lunch that day. He never had a guarantee of my patronage and not granting it that day simply removes one of his alternatives. If he chooses to stay closed on the 20th for the same reason I choose to eat at home, I do not perceive it as directed at me; he just removed an option for me and others that day.

Certainly there is a distribution effect of having purchased the cold cuts at a grocery store the day before. Grocery store sales blip up on the 19th and deli sales blip down on the 20th.

The more general point is that January 20th is a day that deserves a special response from the portion of the public who do not support the Bush regime’s use of the U.S. military for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Taking to the streets, as was done in Ukraine, just doesn’t seem feasible in view of the fact that a majority of the electorate clearly voted for Bush/Cheney and the population in general either supports or is ambivalent about the situation.

Other than a gesture like the “Not One Damn Dime” boycott that is being suggested over the internet, I’m at a loss as to what public statement could be made on January 20 by the heterogeneous anti-Iraq occupation faction. Speeches and personal letters to any of the Bushovics seem futile to me. They seem insulated from all criticism. Suggestions are welcome.

An email called “A Day in the Life of Joe Republican” is making the rounds via a thousand blogs. It is designed to illustrate how the middle class benefits enormously from big government and is too stupid to realize it.

In response, I began the following alternative “Day in the Life”:

Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with bottled water because he knows that the municipal water system supplies water that occasionally has e coli and other natural organisms that will make him ill–after all his mother died from drinking water that was polluted by sewage after a heavy rain. Joe tried to sue, but was told that the city had sovereign immunity from such suits as a result of state law. If the water he pours from the bottle he bought at Safeway is polluted, he knows he can sue the manufacturer and collect big, so he feels pretty sure that it’s clean.

Joe grinds his coffee beans carefully because they’re very expensive as a result of the U.S. government-enforced international coffee cartel that exists to protect the jobs of coffee importers–heavy campaign contributers to Congress. He’s also careful about how much sugar he puts in his coffee because it costs seven times the world price of sugar as a result of the U.S. government imposed import restrictions on sugar to protect the domestic sugar beet and sugar cane industry.

Some mornings he drinks a coke instead, although it hasn’t tasted as good since the manufacturer substituted corn syrup for sugar as a sweetener, since sugar is so expensive.

With his first swallow of coffee Joe takes his daily medication for his liver cancer. His doctor assures him that it is the best medication available in the U.S., although more effective medicines are used in Europe. Joe has a life expectancy of only two more years, but it will be a decade or so until the FDA tests on those other medicines are complete and they are allowed to be sold in the U.S. Joe feels protected anyway; after all, he might lose his hair or suffer some dizziness from the new medicines.. The FDA will protect him from that eventuality. Besides, the medicines he takes are paid for by money that his employer would have otherwise paid him in his regular salary. Since he never sees that money, he doesn’t realize that his medicine isn’t really subsidized by his employer after all.

And so on….

It is now, as the spring semester draws to a close and final exams lie graded on my desk, that I face the fruits of my long labors in Fundamentals of Economics. Despite my extensive dwelling on the basically cooperative nature of the market and the signal characteristic of government as being the legitimated possession and use of coercive power, the majority of my two sections of Fundamentals answered INCORRECTLY the question “How does the text distinguish between government and the market?” Their most preferred answer was “The government is based on cooperation; the market is based on competition.” And we wonder why corporate managers go to jail for “obstruction of justice” while war criminals govern this nation.